Maxar Brand Guidelines: DigitalGlobe + MDA in 2017, Split Into Vantor & Lanteris in 2025

An imagery pioneer and a Canadian space firm.

Maxar was a name created by a merger. On 5 October 2017, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates — the Canadian space company known as MDA — completed its purchase of DigitalGlobe, the American operator of commercial imaging satellites, and the combined company became Maxar Technologies, according to English Wikipedia. Its headquarters were set in Westminster, Colorado, and from 2017 to 2023 its shares traded on both the Toronto and New York stock exchanges.

The imaging side of the business was the older of the two. English Wikipedia traces DigitalGlobe to WorldView Imaging Corporation, founded in January 1992 in Oakland, California, by Walter Scott, who was joined later that year by Doug Gerull as co-founder and chief executive. The start-up was timed to a 1992 American law that opened satellite imaging to private companies. In 1995 it merged with the commercial remote-sensing operations of Ball Aerospace to become EarthWatch, and in September 2001 it was renamed DigitalGlobe. In 2013 DigitalGlobe bought its rival GeoEye. The founding company’s WorldView name is still used for the satellites today.

The early Maxar years were turbulent. In January 2019 the company lost its WorldView-4 satellite, English Wikipedia records, and later that year it restructured its debts and moved its legal home from Canada to Delaware. At the end of 2019 it agreed to sell MDA’s Canadian businesses — ground stations, radar satellite products, robotics and satellite components — to a consortium led by Northern Private Capital; that sale closed on 8 April 2020, and MDA became a separate company again. In 2020 Maxar also bought Vricon, a maker of satellite-derived 3D data.

From a listed company to two private brands.

In May 2023 the private equity firm Advent International completed its purchase of Maxar, taking the company off both stock exchanges. In September 2023, English Wikipedia says, Maxar was organised into two business units: Maxar Space Systems, based in Palo Alto, California, which designed and built satellites, and Maxar Intelligence, based in Westminster, which sold imagery, maps and analysis.

The imaging unit’s main project in those years was WorldView Legion, a fleet of six imaging satellites. The first pair went up in 2024, and the company said on 4 February 2025 that the fifth and sixth had launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and that all six were performing well on orbit. Those are the company’s own words.

Then the Maxar name was retired. On 1 October 2025 Maxar Intelligence announced that it had rebranded as Vantor. Its release said the name “speaks to how the company unlocks a real-time competitive advantage,” and introduced Tensorglobe, a software platform made up of three parts called Cortex, Forge and Nexus. “We’re not just a satellite imagery provider,” the chief executive, Dan Smoot, said in the release. The WorldView tasking service and the Vivid basemaps kept their names. Vantor says it employs more than 2,000 people.

The same day, the satellite-building unit took its own new name. Breaking Defense reported on 4 November 2025 that Maxar Space Systems had been re-branded by Advent as Lanteris on 1 October, a move the magazine said was widely read as a step towards a sale. It described Lanteris as a Palo Alto maker and operator of satellite systems, builder of the Maxar 1300 series of communications satellites for geosynchronous orbit, and a subcontractor to L3Harris on 18 missile-tracking satellites for the Space Development Agency. That same day, the magazine reported, the Houston lunar company Intuitive Machines announced that it would buy Lanteris from Advent. A release dated 13 January 2026, published by Satellite Markets Research, said the purchase had been completed.

Imagery, radar and data from orbit.

Earth-observation companies sell something most customers never see being made. Their satellites are small, distant and short-lived, so the brand has to be carried by what comes back: the picture, the signal and the map. The companies in this guide build or operate satellites that take optical photographs, record radar echoes, or listen for radio signals from ships, aircraft and the atmosphere, and most of them now describe themselves as data or intelligence businesses rather than satellite makers.

Their public image leans on a few recurring scenes. Crisp overhead views of ports, farmland and city grids show what optical satellites can see from orbit. Radar companies favour grainy, false-colour textures in which water turns dark and buildings glow, because radar images look nothing like photographs. Small satellites appear on clean-room benches under bright light, handled by staff in gowns and gloves, as proof that the hardware is real and made in-house.

On their websites the satellite often gives way to the screen. Maps, dashboards, map layers and charts present the data as something a customer can open and use, and product names tend to describe a platform, a feed or a service rather than a spacecraft. Many of these firms sell to governments and defence ministries as well as to farming, shipping, insurance and mapping businesses, so their language swings between mission and market.

The trade meets at shows such as the GEOINT Symposium in the United States and the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium in Europe, where launches, contracts and new image products are announced. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it now, where its satellites are built — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A name that lasted eight years.

Maxar’s identity has to be read as a short chapter. The name covered a satellite builder and an imagery seller from 2017 to 2025; before that, the imagery business had been WorldView Imaging, EarthWatch and DigitalGlobe, and after it the two halves went separate ways. In November 2026 the address maxar.com forwards to Vantor’s website, while Vantor’s own news pages still carry older releases under the Maxar name, such as the WorldView Legion launch.

What carried through was the product language. WorldView, the founding company’s name, labelled Maxar’s satellites from WorldView-4 to WorldView Legion, and Vantor still uses it for its satellite tasking service. The newer names — Tensorglobe, Raptor, Sentry, Vivid — come from the imaging company’s software and mapping side. Vantor’s website now speaks of “spatial intelligence” rather than pictures from space, and of a “living digital twin of Earth” built from its imagery and other sensors. Lanteris, for its part, entered 2026 as part of Intuitive Machines, a company whose earlier work had centred on lunar exploration.

Searchers should watch three traps. Lanteris.com is not the satellite maker: in November 2026 it is a Chinese-language site for an unrelated service for online sellers, while lanterisspace.com forwards to Intuitive Machines. English Wikipedia also notes that DigitalGlobe’s WorldView satellites have nothing to do with an unrelated company called World View, which flies stratospheric balloons. And MDA, Maxar’s Canadian parent in 2017, has been a separate company again since April 2020.

For a design guide, Maxar shows how a product name — WorldView — can outlast several corporate names, and how a private owner can split one brand into two new ones on a single day. Compare Planet, the San Francisco imaging company built around many small satellites, and BlackSky, another American seller of satellite imagery and analysis. For this guide we use a night-orbit navy and a terrain ochre with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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